FINDING HOPE FOR HOUSING

New director of city’s housing commission says education is key

A: SB391 (a bill introduced by Sen. Mark DeSaunier, D-Concord, and co-authored by Assemblywoman Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, and carried over from 2012) is a big priority for the housing commission. That’s projected to generate about $500 million a year (from increased document recording fees).

That can make a real significant dent in the affordable housing need. Infrastructure financing is certainly a big topic here in San Diego. There’s a growing realization that the kind of redevelopment we had before is probably not coming back.

There are plenty of things we can do in public policy that will make it easier and better to build affordable housing and leverage those limited dollars.

Q: Redevelopment programs have ended that set aside 20 percent of their income for affordable housing. What replacements are there?

A: We want to make sure we take another look at existing funding sources, like the linkage fee (paid by commercial developers) and inclusionary fee (paid by market-rate housing builders) and ensure we’re addressing the impacts associated with other forms of development.

Q: Your programs only have limited impact on the region’s overall housing supply. Is there a silver bullet to solve our high housing costs, that are well above the national average?

A: There’s a broader, more global attitudinal change about this.

The utility of affordable housing, whether it’s subsidized or affordable in terms of market rate, is that it is a real impact to our economy.

You can’t expand business if you can’t find workers able to afford to live here. Boosting people’s incomes is one way of going about it.

Another way to go about it is to begin to understand that there’s a real economic impact of a lack of affordability in a lot of our housing. That is going to require some people to think about this differently.

You have to think about housing and affordability without looking for a silver bullet. This is something that affects everyone, especially in a place like San Diego, where we are all paying a relatively high percentage of our income for a place.

Some of that is problematic and some of that is appropriate. Some of it means people right-sizing their expectations and realizing that a certain kind of housing isn’t an appropriate investment for them in their circumstances. I’m happily a renter. I’m unmarried, don’t have kids — what would I do with a house? It’s an investment in certainly some circumstances, but it’s not for everyone.

Q: While at the Department of Housing and Community Development, you dealt with enterprise zones and Brown’s reforms. Some program supporters worry that the proposed changes will be counterproductive. What’s your view?

A: It’s very difficult not to see these as very reasonable closures of really inappropriate loopholes in the program. The changes eliminate retroactive vouchers. You could get a tax credit for an employee you hired nine years in the past (and is no longer working for you).

But the reforms also expand the availability of vouchers for employers who hire veterans and recipients of public assistance. People with apocalyptic visions about the program should take a look at the governor’s budget, which shows it’s going to save $50 million a year out of a $700 million program. So, it’s not going away. This is just going to get rid of some of the big and obvious abuses.